By Babak Dehghanpisheh

Holocaust denier, illegitimate president, and now--crook? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been called a lot of things since his disputed election last June and it doesn't look like the pressure is going to ease up. Last week, Transparency International ranked Iran a miserable ninth from the bottom in its annual Corruption Perceptions Index. What's particularly damning about this ranking is that corruption has nearly doubled under Ahmadinejad's watch: Iran had a score of 2.9 out of 10 in 2005, the first year of his presidency, and now sits uncomfortably at 1.8, a 38 percent drop.

This hasn't gone unnoticed inside the country. A special parliamentary commission, which has been investigating the Ahmadinejad government's privatization of state-run companies during the past three and a half years, presented their findings last week. The commission blasted the government's privatization efforts, claiming that the management of privatized companies was never handed over in many cases. "Unfortunately, there are corrupt individuals from the top to the bottom of this government," Ahmad Tavakoli, the head of the Parliament research center, said in Parliament last week.

One shady deal was singled out by the commission: the recent sale of the Telecommunication Company of Iran, a whopping $7.8 billion share purchase--the biggest in the history of the Iranian stock exchange--to a company run by the Revolutionary Guards. The commission concluded that the consortium contesting the bid was a "fake rival" and the telecom company was essentially handed over to the Guards.

This sale is only one sign of the creeping influence of the Guards into the Iranian economy. A report published by the RAND Corporation earlier this year noted, "From laser eye surgery and construction to automobile manufacturing and real estate, the IRGC has extended its influence into virtually every sector of the Iranian market." More problematic, the RAND report notes, are the allegations that the Guards control much of the country's black-market trade.

With so many governmental or quasi-governmental organizations profiting from the country's closed economic system, it's not hard to see why Iran has been reluctant to embrace overtures by Western countries. The commission's investigations show that there are officials who would like to hold the government accountable. But whether they can challenge powerful groups like the Guards is questionable.

For more on Iran, visit these NEWSWEEK photo essays to learn about the tumult of this summer's protests and see snapshots of daily life in a changing society.